Why You Need To STOP Setting Goals

By Dr. Bojan Kostevski

Today, I’m here to share a secret
with you.

I realize that saying this might
make other fitness professionals condemn me to rot in a dark cave somewhere
with no company but the voice of my own neurotic conscience, but I can no
longer keep my mouth shut.

I
HATE GOAL SETTING.

Yeah, I said it.

I’m about to tell you why I
believe traditional goal setting might be bringing frustration and anxiety upon
you and decreasing your quality of life. Furthermore, I’ll show you how a
simple focus shift can fix the problem in a matter of minutes, resulting in better
results in the gym and living a more enjoyable life in the process.

To illustrate my point, let me
start by sharing a very personal story with you.

Excitement and
Optimism

I remember standing in front of the mirror after a great workout, carefully examining my body. It was in September of 2008.

The
shoulders were thick and solid, as was my back. Arms were a little too small
and upper chest not protruding in the horizontal plane as much as I desired.
Legs had an arching sweep but a little more separation and a higher
hamstring-to-quadriceps ratio would do me good. Lastly, I forced myself to look
at my calves, knowing how I wouldn’t be impressed.

This
was about to change.

Soon,
my chest would protrude in a shelf-like manner beneath my winter parka, like
J-Lo’s behind in undersized denim leggings, and my tumorous calves would
require an area code of their own.

On
a piece of high quality paper, using the fountain pen I’d inherited from my
grandfather, I managed to extravagantly verbalize the details of my desired
physique.

It
was a very sentimental moment for me.

I
made the goals concrete and vivid, with a set deadline to spur immediate action.
I had defined goals of what my limbs would measure 12 months later, colorfully
imagining the measure tape stretching over my bulging biceps as my
serotonin-squirting brain filled me with an immense sense of joy and pride as I
reached my goal.

I
closed my eyes and visualized my future self strolling down the beach, walking
around in the head-turning body I was born to have, finally being the man I was
born to be.

Man,
was I in for a disappointment.

Failure and Insight

In
the summer of 2011, as I was moving to a new apartment, I found the goal sheet.

Not
only had I failed to reach any of the goals (36 months later), despite working
exceedingly hard, but I realized why I had failed: The words in fancy lettering
were nothing but a best-case scenario, a dream. Let it be said that while dreams are important, they are not
actionable.

You Are Not Very Good At Thinking

Variations of this outcome-based
goal setting technique are described in the “Goal Setting” chapter of every fitness
book you’ve ever read. Intuitively, it makes perfect sense, doesn’t it?

You must have a concrete and
vivid picture of how you eventually want to look, assess your current bodily state, and define the distance
between your current and future self. You have to keep this mental picture in
your mind at all times. Every rep of every set, every bite of dead flesh
entering your gastrointestinal tract, staying hungry until you eventually reach
your end goal in the deadline you’ve set for yourself.

As rational as it might sound,
the technique is useless.

Your emotion-driven brain is very
susceptible to flawed and biased thinking and despite your best interests, it’s
highly irrational. Next, we’ll examine some of the shortcomings of the human
mind to better understand why outcome-based goal setting techniques are bound
to fail.

Self-Control
and Delayed Benefits

Exercising and dieting have
up-front costs with severely delayed benefits, thus seriously testing your
capacity for long-term self-control. The reverse is true for smoking, alcohol
and binges at Asian all-you-can-eat buffets. We get pleasure now and suffer
consequences later and being humans, we love immediate pleasure and vastly
ignore delayed costs.

Absence
of Feedback

Rapid response is crucial to
provide positive reinforcement and keep you on track. When practicing
basketball shots it is essential that you see which balls enter the basket and
which don’t, so you can adjust accordingly. Outcome-focused fitness
transformations provide a very abstract and delayed feedback system. Physique
changes simply happen too slow and often in a nonlinear and unpredictable
fashion. Essentially, with traditional goal setting, you’re throwing
basketballs into the dark.

The
Planning Fallacy and Randomness

Lastly, humans have a tendency to
underestimate the required time to project completion and ignore the role of
randomness in predicting the future. Processes, including your fitness
transformation, always take longer then you expect.

Attaining that dream body you so
vividly picture on your retina requires a combination of all those things: a
high level of discipline, sacrifice and self-control, under a very long (and
often underestimated) length of time. The daily costs for the desired benefits
in a very distant and unpredictable future, relentlessly antagonize one during
a time which positive feedback is very limited. Due to these shortcomings of
the human mind, your outcome-based goals transform your useful will power into
an autoimmune disease, doing more harm than good. The result? Frustration,
anxiety and doubt in one’s abilities.

Luckily, there is a cure. Stay
with me.

Finding Flow

The simple solution requires a
shift in perspective. In a few simple steps you can turn your mental auto-focus
system off and manually rotate the focus ring, aiming your attention away from
the abstract wanted outcome to the actual process that will take you there.

Furthermore, if you ever are to
achieve your end goal, you’ll be stuck in the fitness game for a long time so
you might as well maximize your chances of enjoying it. Your training can
become a sensation of Flow; a term popularized by the famous psychology
professor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.

Flow is a mental state in which a
person involved in an activity is fully submerged in a feeling of energized
focus, complete involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the activity.
Action and awareness are merged with total absorption in what one does.

No matter who you ask, the Flow
experience is described in almost identical terms regardless of the activity
that produced it. Athletes, artists, scientists, surgeons, and writers all
describe the most rewarding experiences with very similar words. Activities
that produce the sensation of Flow have:

Clear
goals every step of the way

Immediate
feedback to one's actions

A
perfect balance between challenge and skill, thus balancing the fine line
between frustration and boredom.

I’m sure that you can see how
trying to maximize these factors, and thus increasing the probability for a Flow-like
experience, also acts as an antidote to the shortcomings of the human mind
mentioned earlier.

To stay (sane) in the quest for
physical perfection, I believe you need to enjoy the training for what it is,
not for the outcome you expect 5 years from now. Swinging those weights can
become an intrinsically enjoyable, Flow-like experience, worth doing for
its own sake.

Time to turn that focus ring.

Turning Dreams Into Actions

So, you have a dream. A vision of
what you want to achieve with your training. As I’m sure you understand by now,
dreams alone won’t get you anywhere.

Time to shift your perspective.

Know your direction but focus
less on defining exactly WHAT YOU WANT, and more on WHAT TO DO. Define the
specific short-term actions that will maximize your chances of one day reaching
your outcome-based goals. Write them down and then focus all your attention on
your Action Goals, thus shifting the
focus from the wanted outcome to the process.

Ask yourself the following:

What
specific actions can I take to maximize the chances of ever reaching the body
of my dream? This week? Today?

To give you an example, whereas
my goal for my calves used to be: add 2
cm to calf circumference in 12 months, today I’d start by asking myself the
following:

What can I DO to maximize the
chances of increasing my calf size?

Then I’d set the goal for the
week as following: This week, my goal is 3 calf workouts (mon, wed, sat) and
2 heavy squat sessions (tue, sun), while eating 200 grams of protein daily and
getting at least 6 hours of sleep every night.

Every Sunday, on my action sheet
or in a calendar, I write the action goals down on their respective days, check
them off during the week as I go, and then evaluate and reward every completed
action goal the following Sunday. I then set new action goals for the upcoming
week in the same manner.

Why It Works

Note how this focus shift reduces
the distance between cost and pleasure from 12 months (vastly underestimated
time) into a week. It turns an abstract and distant outcome-goal into an
immediate actionable goal that is 100% in your control and provides the
possibility for rapid respone, making it possible through trial and error to
correct the basketball shots of your fitness journey, both acting as antidote
for the autoimmune human mind and maximizing the chances for Flow-like training experiences.

It
took me another 2 years and one more move to find the sheet of paper again. By
that time, I had met all my goals, but instead of one burst of positive
feedback 5 years later, I’d been enjoying every single day, training because I
love it.

By stepping out of the best-case-scenario, by matching your
outcome-based dreams to actionable goals that are in your control, you can turn
your journey, and eventually your life into a Flow-like experience and, eventually, reach your dreams by trial
and error. While it might seem like a waste of time, to learn and evolve in any
domain, trial-and-error is a necessity, so you might as well learn to enjoy it.

Today, the ‘wasted time’ in the
gym is my way to filter out the rest of the world. It’s my psychotherapy and my
meditation. Gym time is MY time, and over the years, the iron has shaped me,
both physically and mentally, into the man I am today.

Here’s one last piece of advice
for you: don't be so goddamn afraid of wasting your time. Walk for the sake of
walking. Read for the sake of reading. Lift for the sake of lifting. Because,
in the end, what else is life than a collection of wasted times? More often
then not, in the wasted times, retrospectively, is where all the magic
happened.

Today I love the process of training, and lift heavy
because it’s a part of who I am. A chest the size of J-Lo’s butt in undersized
denim leggings is nothing but a (very) nice bonus.

Dr. Bojan Kostevski is a former personal trainer who turned his passion for health and fitness into a medical degree. Working as a physician and online trainer he follows his original interest in preventive medicine and uses his passion to educate himself and others around him how to achieve what most of us are seeking: confident and obsession free personalities with strong, good-looking physiques. Check out his site http://www.Lift-Heavy.com for more information.